Greedy bankers? Check first whether you live in a glass house.

They say that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. There seem to be increasing comments in the press seeking to blame greedy bankers or greedy oligarchs for the “bad financial state” we are in.

Writing in this week’s Church Times, Dr Alan Storkey writes at length about how our understanding of the current “financial problems” are mis-stated by the government, as if to throw a smoke screen. He writes that (at least at the moment) Britain’s “financial problems” do not flow from difficulties of the Eurozone but from de-industrialisation, the sale of our firms to overseas owners, and the choice of the Treasury – in allowing a “credit-financed boom” – to finance that not through ensuring that rich people are taxed proportionately but through borrowing instead.

So, where does the buck stop? Perhaps the failure of the government, in the eyes of many, to “punish” banking leaders enough is because they feel some guilt. However, who are we to point the finger of blame? Although corruption in government is not unheard of, governments on the whole try to give the electorate the sugar-coated candy that they ask for.

Maybe I should not blame banking leaders for making the most of legal deregulation to make money. Maybe I should ask myself what I am colluding with the government to unwisely ask for.